Wise demands a massive fee through bid-offer spread, they're more expensive than many regular retail banks for FX conversion. They're basically running a deceptive advertising campaign due to customers not knowing about bid offer spread.

Wise is even worse than "zero-fee" stock trading platforms like Robin hood who do payment for order flow. At least PFOF is more competitive and regulated and you're only getting a few basis points stolen from you instead of like 80 basis points.

From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.

Wise fees are sometimes big, but I find them fairly transparent about it.